If Perfectionism were a person, I’d slap her. I’d flush her head down the toilet and muss up her hair and squirt ketchup in her eyes. I’d scuff her shoes and force her to return her library books late. I’d make her walk on cracks and eat spaghetti with her fingers and colour outside the lines until she finally promised to Just Stop Trying. To Get It Wrong. And to stop ruining my life. Ms P and I have grown …Read More

How do you make friends? That’s a genuine question. Social situations (at least for me), are like watching cricket: I’ve learned to clap in the right places, but sometime I still haven’t a clue what’s going on. I’m getting better, but I struggle. Where do people learn to do this stuff? Smiling and breathing and talking, all at the same time. Putting jokes in appropriate places. Making the right noises. The fine head angle between ‘I’m interested’ and ‘I’m a stalker’. …Read More

Today the first copy of ‘A New Name’ plopped through the door. As they say in Belfast, ‘scary dinners’, (which, given that it’s the memoir of an anorexic, is appropriate). As the book ‘comes out’, there’s a sense in which I’m also emerging. Not as a debutante, sparkly and poised, but tumbling from the closet… blinking, nervous and pretty grimy too. Against my natural instincts, I’ve started being honest about who I am. As someone who’s used to hiding …Read More

I don’t know what you’re facing right now. Whether this has been a good weekend or a really tough one. Whether you’re feeling encouraged – or tired and weak. But I do know this: the Lord is good. Those who trust in Him will never be disappointed. So as we gird up for the week ahead, here’s a reminder of Who it is who goes ahead of us: (From Nehemiah 9).. I alone am the Lord I give you …Read More

My book – A New Name, is published a week today. It’s been a year in the writing and is my life story to date. It’s the story of a girl with an eating disorder. And how she tried to make her life work. It’s about what drives a person to starve themselves to death – as a teenager and then again as an adult. It’s about wanting to fit in and wanting to stand out. About hungers that feel too big …Read More

I’m not a sports-person. I blame the education system. At school we had to do gym in green pants, (yes pants in the British sense, ie; underwear not trousers) on a dusty floor that smelt of wee. I still wake sweating, to the sound of pinging elastic. But that’s another post. (Or maybe – note to self – a Christian version of Fifty Shades. Possibly with a vampire twist). Where was I? Ah yes. Exercise. It’s actually not so bad …Read More

Yep, you heard me. A stinking, horrible, miserable fraud. I’ve always felt it. There’s something in me – something bad – that needs to be covered up. I can’t tell you what it is – I don’t know myself. But in the silence – when the TV’s off and I’m in between tasks – it whispers to me. When I wake in the night and it’s dark and the world is asleep, it shouts. It reminds me that if people …Read More

What do Christians look like to the rest of the world? How do others make sense of our behaviour – and does it matter? Here’s a snapshot, taken from the Guardian’s problem page. In it, readers advise a woman who ‘has been rejected by a man because he is an evangelical Christian’. She writes; I am a 43-year-old woman who has been friends for 10 years with a man of 40. Neither of us has been in a relationship …Read More

There’s something about a new week that brings on the wobbles. Sunday morning I’m fine. Floating along on a woolly weekend haze. Sunday afternoon – middling to fair. By evening I’m getting a little twitchy. I give myself a lecture, ‘it’s just another day. Now man up and go to bed’.(Being told to ‘man up’ isn’t the world’s greatest motivator. But the alternative is Panic and we’re not going there). The alarm goes off and for a few moments I …Read More

So there’s this gym in Barnsley, right? Lifestyle Fitness. End of Shambles Street (and no I haven’t made that up). Some of the locals say Shambles is spot – on: on account of the people who congregate outside it. Drug-users, vagrants, threatening yoofs. One bloke – a tramp – even beds down in front of the building. Imagine! You’re heading for a quick circuit on the treadmaster before your board meeting and you’ve got to step over some greasy …Read More